Warm Hearts Cold Steel
by one-winged-shinigami
Summary: Duo’s a high school deviant with a problem with authority and most other people. He’s just learned he has to take an after school sport to get into his college of choice. Heero’s a hardcore fencing addict who suddenly winds up with a rambunctious braide


Title: Warm Hearts, Cold Steel

Author: One Winged Shinigami

Pairing: 12, 3+4, S+5, 6+9, 13+11

Rating: R

Warnings: Language, Yaoi, some Lime, small drug use, distant lemons, Elementals, and Transgender (it's not one of the pilots but they do matter a lot and I'm seriously delving into what it's like to live as the wrong gender, this has nothing to do with whimsical cross-dressing.)

Notes: This was inspired by all the wonderful feedback I received for this: http://community. Read it for a bit of background to this. I'm even going to go as far as to tell you which character's back history and such are based of real people and which character's are not. I'm not going to use many OCs. I'm certainly not going to go OOC if I can help it. This is much lighter in tone than a lot of my stuff, don't expect this to be like TBBM or anything. Technically this is a school fic, which under most circumstances can go horribly wrong, but I'm focusing more on the fencing team aspect (and outside school.) This isn't just "the pilots in a normal setting on a whim."

Disclaimer: GW is still not mine and dorky music inserts are not either. I do not own any of the literature I reference nor the lines I'll take films. Many of the situations are 100 RL, so be nice!

Summary: Duo's a high school deviant with a problem with authority (and most other people.) He's just learned he has to take an after school sport to get into his college of choice. Heero's a hardcore fencing addict who suddenly winds up with a rambunctious braided boy on his team, and his life. The two do not hit it off well but is this because they truly hate each other's guts, or is there something else fueling the fire?

Warm Hearts, Cold Steel  
By One Winged Shinigami

)\ /(

Chapter 1  
En Garde

_Everything you know, You wonder friend or foe  
I'm the burning in your throat when you swallow  
And then you spit me out, Your stomach full of doubt  
Now you're faking every word out of your mouth  
And when you won't let go, It's all about control  
Understand I'm born to lead you will follow  
Now I don't wanna stay, and I'm running away  
Don't you hear me when I say_

_Goodbye, so long, nice try, I'm gone  
If you don't like being second  
I don't like being wrong  
I won't forget, the way you made me feel  
I won't regret, running away from here  
So I say goodbye again  
So I say goodbye again_

_  
And now it's there to see, you've forgotten me  
Ever since I was the prince among the thieves  
So you hold me down, Strip away my crown  
Can't contain me knowing all the truth I've found  
Always thinking small, helping me to fall  
Now your jealousy and hate consumes us all  
I don't wanna stay  
and I'm running away_

_Don't you hear me when I say_

_Goodbye, so long, nice try, I'm gone  
If you don't like being second  
I don't like being wrong  
I won't forget, the way you made me feel  
I won't regret, running away from here  
You think you see the world, but you see nothing  
You think you see the world, but you see nothing_

_Time is only gonna make it worse in the end  
So I say goodbye again_

_Don't hit me with your fears, I don't fit with your ideas  
You missed what I'm about, I earned my way out  
And in the end, I say goodbye again_

_I won't forget, the way you made me feel  
I won't regret, running away from here  
I won't forget, the way you made me feel  
I won't regret, so I say goodbye again  
Goodbye, so long, nice try, I'm gone  
Goodbye, so long, nice try, I'm gone_

_Goodbye, so long, nice try, I'm gone_

_Goodbye, so long, nice try, I'm gone_

_So I say goodbye again_

)\ /(

The sunrise burned red in a pure sky, deep shadows stretched throughout the parking lot. It soon became swarmed with a gaily-colored crowd, all rushing to enter the high standing building cast in stone and brick. Wind whipped throughout the world, whispering into the early halls that lay near doorways. At one said door a supple boy appeared clad all in black with a long braided rope of rich chestnut brown hair trailing down hi back. The motions of his mind were incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches. He stared contemplatively around at the students running around like ants, sucked into strange patterns and systems.

He snorted and walked up a long flight of stairs, entering a room labeled, "Guidance Office." He remained there, talking with his councilor for long hours, unaware that this would be the first day of the rest of his life.

Duo finally stumbled out of the office, breathing harshly. "I can't believe this!" he shrieked for all to hear. Heads turned to look at the strange Goth versus punk looking boy, but quickly turned away with the knowledge that it was just a weirdo. November marked the beginning of the 2nd Quarter as well as the ending to all the fall sports, not that Duo would have usually given a shit, but now he had to, apparently. He was about to have a fit right there in the middle of the hallway. His completely useless guidance counselor had just informed him that his college of choice required participation in a school sport. Art school was supposed to not care about this shit, why the fuck did they require such torture?!

A tall, lanky brunette slid up beside the braided teen, poking him in the side. He had deep mossy green eyes, well eye actually; a long earthy brown bang covered one of them. "Duo, what's up? I could hear you all the way from the Science Wing." He asked, frowning as he took in the frazzled state of the other boy. Duo's wavy cascade of autumn hair was messily sticking out of his braid, one strand at a time, and his fists were clenched tighter than the airport security at JFK, the whites of his knuckles could clearly be seen through his skin.

Duo turned to his best friend with a quivering lip, trying to muster up good puppy dog eyes and halfway succeeding. "Tro, love of my life, the world hates me." Trowa was, of course, not really Duo's lover but Duo had a knack for pulling that line out whenever he wanted something from the taller teen. In this case, it might have been something as simple as a hug Duo wasn't sure.

A whap of Trowa's binder on his head put Duo in his place about his use of endearments and then a firm hand was placed on his shoulder as Trowa leaned down to stare Duo in the eyes. The first thought that ran through Duo's head, as Trowa bent down, was the eternal damnation of his growth hormones, which he hoped were just late boomers, instead of made dysfunctional by his malnourished childhood. "What's wrong?" Trowa asked again.

Duo sighed, "I have to do a fucking winter sport to go to college. You know I hate those games and all those people who come with it, we're like oil and water." He rubbed his hands together to illustrate his point. He looked up to see Trowa was still waiting for more so he went back to rambling, "you'd think they'd appreciate the theater more, at least that's liberal arts. I do have a couple of performances this winter, ya know. Don't know what kind of team would want me on it in the first place…"

Trowa released his hold of Duo's shoulder and stood more upright again. He then interrupted Duo's mumblings, "Duo wait, hold up a sec, I have some good news for you." Duo highly doubted that there was anything good about this situation, but nonetheless he raised a thin eyebrow, willing Trowa to continue. "I don't know if you've heard, because the school obviously doesn't put it on the level of other sports teams, but there is a fencing team at this school. It's a different kind of game, more focused on the individual and less on team politics, and it can only be as competitive as you want it to be."

Scratching his auburn head in contemplation, Duo thought about it for a bit. "I suppose it's an improvement." He glanced at the big black watch around his wrist to find that it was almost lunch time, he sighed, placing a hand on his hip. "It's still a waste of time though, are you on it or something?"

Trowa flicked the black cap off Duo's head playfully. "I will be this year, maybe you can get the whole gang to join in." Duo, drew a hand through his hair. Sighing, he bent completely over, his head nestled between his legs as he retrieved the hat from where it had landed behind him. Returning to a standing position, he shoved it back atop his head. "It never fails to amaze me how flexible you are Duo, sure you don't wanna join the circus?" He snickered at the long haired boy playfully.

"Asshole." He glared at Trowa for a moment before letting his face fall into its normal expression. Returning to the previous topic of conversation, Duo sighed, "I doubt Hilde's gonna want to have a repeat of the 'Locker Room Fiasco." He made the cliché quotation marks with his fingers as he remarket upon the incident at the end of last year.

"Well Dorothy's already on the team, and I know I'm joining. Trowa tried desperately to cheer the other up. He knew the season would be hell if he had Duo griping at him all the time. "If you have to do this, might as well make the best of it, right?"

Duo rubbed his eyes in an exasperated manner, junior year was starting to take it's tole on him. "What am I going to do about work? What about rehearsal? Why do they assume students have any time for this bull shit?!" The bell, if you could call it a bell because it sounded more like the noise they made over the loud speaker in lingerie departments, interrupted him, signaling the beginning of lunch. Grabbing Trowa firmly by the arm, Duo began dragging him down the hall. Lunch was not a time to be wasted.

"I don't know Duo, I think they assume that a lack of stuff to do results in children being led astray to do illicit things." Trowa let himself get pulled down the overcrowded overpass, oh right; it was now to be referred to as the "concourse." How official.

It never failed to sicken Duo when he saw the masses of people storming down the hall all looking like one big blob of "sameness and lameness" and still thinking that their individual person was so much better than the rest. How stupid could one get? "Well they'd be right about that one. Still doesn't mean they have to go out of their way and try to kill me with extra curricular activities. I have enough problems as it is."

They made it out of the busy hallway into a much quieter one at the end of the second building. Their high school was a bit strange. It was actually two buildings next each other, one was on the top of a hill and the other was at the bottom. They were connected by one large hallway, the "concourse," via the top floor of the first building and the bottom of the second.

The first building was more fashionably structured and held the science, math, and foreign language classes. It was called O, as that was the first initial of the school they went to. Duo, however, called it Yin. The second building was built in a more peculiar manner and was called Z for the same reason. It held the English, History, and Elective classes and was of course called Yang by Duo.

"I have some good news though," Duo finally piped up as they neared their usual lunch area. It was located at the back of Yang, close to the Pace (Performing Arts Curriculum Experience) Theater.

Trowa glanced at Duo out of the corner of his eye. "Oh really, now? What might that be?" In most cases 'No news is good news' basically carried through Duo's life. There was always something going on with the braided boy. He was a catastrophe waiting to happen, and Duo knew it too, embraced it even. His friends even went as far as to call him 'whirlwind' sometimes.

"I um… I'm getting out of Apple." Duo grinned up at the taller boy, knowing the news would come as a huge shock to him. APPLE, A Place People Learn Excellence, was a school within a school. It was where they sent all the misfits, deviants, and delinquents. Instead of having a normal rotation of classes, that gave you the option of having many different teachers, you had the same teachers as everyone else in Apple. It was an inner community of sorts, shoved as far away from the rest of the school, in the back on Yin. Duo's behavior had gotten him stuck in the "Apple category" since he was a freshman but now, apparently, they were releasing him back upon the world.

The shocked expression on Trowa's face lived up to Duo's expectations of how the news would affect the other. "No shit, Duo! That's… well…" he glanced down a Duo smugly, "wait a minute why are they letting you out? Are they insane?!" Truly, Duo was most likely not meant for the Apple program, but it had worked in his favor in some ways. Students in Apple took classes much less seriously and therefore the entire curriculum and work load was much more forgiving. Not that Duo wasn't smart, because he could be scarily intelligent at times, it was the fact that he had needed to do a lot of catch up work since his admittance into the system.

Duo growled and punched Trowa in the shoulder as they rounded a corner. A girl in a vintage style skirt with long blond hair, her most distinguishing feature being her split eyebrows, sat against a wall, deftly peeling a Clementine all in one go. Next to her sat a short very tomboyish looking girl, desperately trying to get a sufficient amount of noodles out of her thermos. Trowa nodded to the pair of them, "Dorothy, Hilde, don't you have club today?" He went to go stand beside the blonde, Dorothy, leaning his back against the wall as Duo hopped upon a windowsill in a graceful, cat like performance that they'd all seen before.

Hilde smiled warmly up at Trowa. "No, they decided to switch the days around. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be right now so I just came back here." It was nice just being able to hang out for once, she decided. Junior year had too much stuff going on, it was hard finding a chance to just breathe and feed oneself.

Duo coughed to get their attention; they all looked up at him. "Ladies and Gents, I have an unfortunate announcement to make. I will have to resign my position of Devils Advocate as I was just been informed that I will have to participate in a winter sport this year. I am sorry. I have failed you all by committing such a terrible sin. Thank you for your time." He bowed low to his audience and then hoped off the make shift stage, sitting against instead. "Now who has food for me today?"

"Duo…" Hilde began with a bit of trepidation, it always felt awkward to talk serious matters over with Duo, and he always had to make it so difficult. "What happened this time?" She peered at him from behind her thin dark blue bangs.

Duo blinked, not understanding. "What do you mean? Didn't I just explain that? I've sold my soul." People who did sports always somehow managed to think that they were somehow better off for it, and better than you because of it. Their High and Mighty routines drove Duo up the wall and he wanted no association with such events.

"Oh please, Duo, it's insulting to think that'd we'd stop respecting you just because you joined a sports team, without a choice no less." Dorothy grinned a vicious smile at the violet-eyed boy. "Besides, you've lost almost all of it already. You don't seriously believe you have any decency left after all the ridiculous stunts you pull?"

A frown settled upon Duo's face. "If you're referring to the fact that I've gotten called to the office two times this week, I don't want to here it." He paused looking around, making sure he had all their attention when he said this. "You all have known me long enough to know how I roll."

"Duo, we aren't talking about your habit of getting into fights, we're talking about you in general." Trowa interrupted. This conversation was a bit meaty for a lunch break. He broke off half his bagel and handed it to Duo. "Here, happy?"

Duo grinned, snatching the food out of the stoic boy's hands. "Thanks man!" He gobbled the bagel down, licking all the extra cream cheese from around his mouth with a large sweep of the tongue. He smacked his lips, smiling. "Anyone else?"

"See, this is what we're talking about" mumbled Dorothy, tucking a blonde strand of hair behind her ear as she reluctantly threw Duo her other clementine. He deftly caught it in his left hand. "You remind me of monkey who does tricks for food," she continued.

Duo sighed, "again with the circus analogies? Do you really think they could keep me in a cage like that?" If there was one thing Duo felt he had managed to keep all these years, it was his freedom. No one got to tell him what to do or how to run his life. Maybe that was why he had such a problem listening to people but honestly, Duo could feel it ran deeper than that. He peeled the clementine and bit into it like it was an apple, unlike the usual manner of eating one piece at a time.

Hilde laughed long and loud, "definitely not, you'd drive your owner nuts."

"I don't know, who said anything about him having to be in a cage to be a monkey?" jibed Trowa.

"Glad to know you're always on my side, bro." Duo said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

)\ /(

The obnoxious bell finally signaled the end of the school day, as well as the last day of apple for Duo. He knocked a desk over as he bolted for the door, barely remembering to grab his messenger bag. "I'm outta here!" He hollered over his shoulder, never looking back at the place that had been his school for the past 2 and a half years. He kept running till he was at the end of the hall and then slowed to a walk to mull things over. He had never really hated apple. The people there were a lot less fake, a lot more down to earth, and he could relate to them far better than a regular student.

The fact of the matter was that it really was all politics and a social hierarchy that landed kids in apple. OZ High lay in between too very polarized towns. One was the richest of the rich. Ranked 10th in the country, it ran along the beaches of the Long Island Sound, and had some of the highest property taxes in the world. The second town was smaller but much more densely populated. Filled with run down apartments, (vs. the huge manors the first held,) a lot of illegal immigrants and people from the ghetto settled down there. It was a lot more urban, a lot less nice to look at, and held one of the only Day Labor parks left in the state, hence the large amount of immigrants. Kids' fates were determined by which town they were born in. It's an easy guess as to which one was where all the apple kids came from.

However, Duo knew that he was a lot more passionate then the bums he had for classmates at the moment. He didn't want to be spoon-fed overcooked scraps of information; he wanted meat. Something inspiring, like his theater class which was coincidentally his only non apple class besides gym. Duo looked up to find that his feet were carrying him in the wrong direction, he had forgotten about his new form of torture. The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic. Cursing, he spun around on his heels and plunged swiftly down the stairs, singing loudly to himself.

_Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage_

_Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage  
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved  
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage_

As he sung the last line of the chorus he hurtled into the gym and only managed to catch a flash of white as bright as snow on a winter's morning coming at him from the side before he promptly smashed into a well-toned chest, knocking Duo and whoever it was to the floor. He lay half-sprawled over the other, trying to get his head in the right place. "What the fuck man?!" The lights bounced around his eyes as he tried to look up to see who had tackled him to the ground, but the person had a strange metal meshed helmet over his face, blocking his view.

"I could say the same to you" growled a deep rumbling voice. The white clad boy sat up, yanking his helmet off to glare eyes of icy fire at the braided boy. "Who do you think you are, barging in on my bout!" He wasn't screaming but the words were bit out in a highly pissed off manner.

Duo barely had time to admire the chiseled sun kissed face, or the oriental Prussian eyes; he was too caught up with the audacity of the other boy. "Hey Dude!" he punctuated, "you just ran my ass over and you've got Your panties in a twist? You're the one who came speeding backwards without a care!"

The Asian boy slammed his hand down hard on the black strip of mat he was sitting on. "You were on my strip!" He barked as if that was the be all and end all to the argument. His messy chocolate bangs shifted around his head at the jerky movement.

Frowning some more, Duo leaned closer to stare the boy right in the eyes, noticing that they shifted color in the light like ice in winter sunlight. "I did not take one step on Your Strip, I went behind it thanks much! Too bad your stupid helmet makes you blind since you obviously didn't see that…" He would have continued on in a much more degrading manner but a loud voice interrupted them.

_  
_"All right folks, team meeting, lets go," an aged old man with barely a few whips of hair remaining on his head shouted. Despite the pathetic state of his body Duo could tell he ran the show here, and from the way kids were scrambling to follow his instructions showed that he wasn't a complete vegetable yet.

He was about to jump to his feet to join them but a gloved hand shot out, squeezing the life out of his wrist. Duo refocused his gaze on the frost bitten boy, raising an eyebrow tactfully. "Do not start shit with me" the oriental boy hissed out, squeezing a bit tighter before releasing the braided boy's arm.

Duo sprang to his feet, brushing some dust off his rump. "I don't start shit, I end shit" and with that he began to step over the boy, conveniently letting his messenger bag slide off his shoulder onto the other's stomach, which was not a weight to be trifled with as Duo had yet to grasp the concept of a locker. Duo smiled at the satisfying "oof" it produced. He smirked down at the boy before strolling off towards the coach, picking up the same tune to sing from before.

_Tell me I'm the only one  
Tell me there's no other one  
Jesus was the only son for you_

_And I still believe that I cannot be saved_

_And I still believe that I cannot be saved_

_And I still believe that I cannot be saved_

_And I still believe that I cannot be saved_

)\ /(

And thus the epic fic begins. I'm planning to make this LOOOONGG. Be prepared for a bumpy ride for Heero and Duo. I'm trying to have a couple of themes in here along with a plot with a couple of twists.

There are two books I reference in this chapter and it's kind of obvious which ones but if you guess them correctly I'll check you off on my list and the person with the best score at the end of the fic will get the original "Warm Hearts, Cold Steel" long sleeve shirt (trust me, it's cool).

The song at the top is called Goodbye by Sr-71 and the song Duo sings is called Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins which needs LOTS OF LUV.

Please please please comment!!!

COMMENT!!


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